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Multilingual Commons is the blog of the Center for Language Study at Yale University. It showcases events, topics, and opinions of interest to the second language teaching and learning community at Yale, and features writing by staff and language faculty.

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In the current (March/April 2016) issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, David Zax, YC '06, covers how Yale is adapting to the 'digital revolution' in teaching and learning. The article, entitled "The digital evolution of teaching at Yale," also briefly mentions the Center for Language Study's Shared Course Initiative: Improving the Yale learning experience is a…

For those of you who are interested in the activities of CALICO, the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, we're re-posting a recent update message to members from the group's president, Phil Hubbard. Happy 2016 CALICO members and friends! I thought I would take this opportunity to let you know what your Executive Board and some other…

I just came across a useful article by William Fenton in PC Mag, reflecting on future trends in online education in light of happenings at the recent Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning-organized Learning With MOOCs II conference: "Online Education: The Year Ahead" While the article has helpful summaries of topics and trends (as well…

On Tuesday, April 21, Angie Gleason, Minjin Hashbat, and Dave Malinowski of the CLS joined dozens and dozens of Yale faculty and staff welcoming hundreds of prospective freshmen and their parents to information tables in Payne Whitney Gym, part of the university's annual Bulldog Days. Present also were many of the dedicated language faculty at…

The Yale Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), in partnership with the Bass Library and ITS, is offering two sets of 20 iPad Airs (32GB, WI-Fi-only) and two sets of 20 iPad Minis (16GB, WI-Fi-only) for instructional use during both 2015 summer sessions. Yale faculty members interested in using the iPads for either of the…

10mTT v 2015.1: Interactive stories and future directions

Last Wednesday we had our first sesison of 10-minute Tech Talks, with 20 people present to talk about what technologies they were most excited about or challenged by in 2014, and what they’re looking forward to in 2015. This was followed by my overview of inklewriter, a writing tool that I’ll describe more below.

It was nice last last week to have the luxury to do a quick round of introductions and hear a little bit about the technology projects that Yale instructors in Chinese, isiZulu, Greek, Arabic, and many other languages have in mind for the coming year. A few people mentioned they wanted to become more familiar with specific tools and practices, like blogging; I thought in coming months we might like to review some of the blogging and related options available to language classes–including the new CoursePress, AcademicPress, and CampusPress services from ITS (the follow-up services to Yale’s Academic Commons based on the WordPress blogging platform).

Other participants talked about the video and digital storytelling projects they’re looking to expand this year. And a surprise for me was the desire expressed by several people to mine deeper into features and use of Yale’s learning management system Classes*v2, as well as a newer system called Canvas that is also available to those who’d like to try it out. It looks like we might want to have a 10-min. Tech Talk session focused explicitly on Classes*v2.

My tech talk was on inklewriter, a neat browser-based, interactive story writing and publishing tool from Inkle, a video game company that has won awards for interactive fiction games like 80 Days. Inklewriter allows you and your students to create primarily written texts where you’d like the reader to interact by choosing between options that the author presents as often as s/he likes. You can see an example of a completed story, from the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, on their website; I made this silly example for the tech talk to show how it looks with a non-English language. Thinking about it a little more, I can imagine inklewriter might be interesting to try in the language classroom for:

Having students imagine and extend short textbook dialogues for practicing grammar, pragmatics, and more

Making an imaginary travel guide to a city

…and there must be many more…

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few links and resources that were being passed around: I copied and handed out a list of Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning 2014, a collection that’s updated every year and is a pretty widely circulated in educational technology circles (see how many of the top 20 you use in your teaching!) Through the process of working with faculty and Edward O’Neill, on the Educational Technologies team over at ITS, I just discovered this great Yale AITS list of teaching tools with categories for active learning, online collaboration, video and more (thanks, Edward!). And there in person at the tech talks we were lucky to have a very familiar face here at the CLS, Trip Kirkpatrick, who’s now with ITS and the Center for Teaching and Learning. He mentioned some resources he’s put together ofor integrating maps and timelines into learning activities; we hope he’ll be able to join us next time to introduce some of these in person.

As usual, we’re keeping track of most of the online tools mentioned on our Diigo group page. Please feel free to join and add to the collection (and consider how you might use Diigo in your classes too, to compile, annotate, and share any kinds of content you use in your classes).

Our next 10-minute Tech Talks will happen on Wednesday, February 18, and we’re looking for presenters! Please email me if you’re interested, and leave a comment below with your response to any of this. After all, with Blizzard Juno moving in and Yale classes cancelled Tuesday, we’ve all got a little extra time to talk tech now 🙂

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Lots of interesting information posted! I particularly like the “Cultura” activities, both fun and appropriate for traditional and heritage language classes.

A few months ago I visited the Brooklyn Art Museum and was struck by an exhibit: Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn, “…cross-cultural installation was developed to create new ways of looking at art by making connections between cultures as well as objects.” I recently had my students apply this concept in a follow up activity to our visit to the Art of the Ancient America’s room at YUAG. The students chose one object in the collection, photographed it and as a homework assignment connected it with two other objects, preferably from different cultures and/or periods. The results, along with a short explanatory note, were posted on the class blog. I am very pleased with the results and the students seemed to have enjoyed the experience. Needless to say, the activity does not require a museum visit; one could readily choose an everyday object or find an image online.

It’s good to hear these lesson ideas, Sybil. I looked up the Brooklyn Art Museum exhibit and think I found it here. Especially interesting to see the focus on “people” “place” and “objects” and think about how technology might help students bring these together, like it sounds like yours did using blogs.

And then thinking back to inklewriter and the idea of interactive, branching stories, it makes me think about starting a “story” with one work of art and then seeing what new interpretations open up if you match the original work with progressively more (and different) other objects, places, people, etc., where the choice of matching it with this or that object, this or that place, etc. could be one node in the interactive story. In the end you might have a dozen or more interpretive paths that could be taken from the same work of art/starting point.